Bio: Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active for several years as writer, poet, artist, and editor. A multiple nominee for the Pushcart and Best of the Net for poetry and fiction, he has recent poetry in online and print publications like TAJ MAHAL REVIEW, LOTHLORIEN POETY JOURNAL, BLUEPEPPER, FLASHES OF BRILLIANCE, DREICH, and elsewhere. His recent poetry books are Night Pictures from the Climate Change (Cyberwit.net) and Particle Acceleration on Judgement Day (Impspired).
Vase
Tumbler of words, iconic memories overflow
The broken mauve vase on my studio window ledge,
Once overtopped with dandelion petals –
Like offerings to the unfaithful muse
In hiding,
Now simply residue’s wreckage in shatter-spleen.
Divorced from creation’s god-cave, quite simply
My echoing self-portrait on the mantel-haze.
When words & images fail, no longer crystallizing
The winter of sad discontent freezing the birds
With their brittle plumage devoid of colors.
With the fallen rainbow of godsends
Mired now in the lake’s great bathtub,
Rippling only the surface of nothingness
For the existential fauna still roaming about?
Vase, once serpentine vertical masterpiece
Blown in some Venetian glassworks
Decades ago: blue green emerald marine glints
Now reduced to effigies of former radiance
The painterly eye readily discards.
A vase: once somehow feline in its Egyptian repose,
How the stately vibes of regal tombs inhabited it.
How the inky evenings passed in visual changelings
With the myriad motes of mind-into-matter.
Passing through the studio’s brackish airs,
Rekindling the visual echo of myself too.
Posing like Rembrandt himself in full glory
Before the window’s once bright full mirror,
Now variegated with nature’s grimed eternity
This pock-marked visions of bygone majesty
I took down from the canyon’s wall,
A tumbler of just leaves & dirt clod dust
Vanishing in broken memory
Necropolis with Graven Vine
Auto-correct the unknown necropolis, the place enticing all orbs
Floating through this spiritual abyss
Of a cross-vectored mind at midnight’s edge
Held in vast fingertips suppurating, how all disgorges
Milk sap of the serpentine vine’s slither
Around cyber throats in waiting.
I live there now, in the suburban trellis of wayward leaves
Inveigling me, my resistance to the umbilical thorn
There’s no daily escape from. How it elongates,
Becomes an artificial connection to all death-in-life
& grows in its backward malevolence. How
It reaches into the tunnel of all selves to keep the sweet
Blossom of night there: the unrivalled, tubing orbs
Without end, extending onto the dour night’s landscape
Overrun with jungle roots, bamboo shoots, all greensward
Stalks splintering into the horizontal layer upon layer.
The horticultural download in my untended garden
For damned delights, pulsing hotly against the livid worm
Escaping from the orifice of the once verdant soul-flesh
Now banished from my spade, an obsolete evolutionary
Fact the blue-bottle flies swarm over as afterthoughts
On my body’s spoiled feast your lips devour
All the Ash-Colored Bullets
Dissolve into irrelevance, before I take the brandished sight
From eyes of your childish beholder. Brace of shadowy
Scintillation underwhelming itself, a scribbled sunrise
Feebly sailing the ocean’s sadness with your hopes.
After the gunfire, no one to remember you
Except friends who made it out alive
To meld into vast statistics for the census bureau.
A continuum of mass shootings to spoil lunch
With your beautician or work-out trainer,
Once distant horror encroaching incrementally
With each social media post or digital headline
Confirming the unacceptable, in diurnal dismay.
Come to the sanctuary of my underground fastness
I recall you texted me then, out of sorts
Yet believing the barbaric events would subside
As America regained its senses, & put down the gun
To begin that awful trek to sanity once again.
So you said it, wrote it, breathed it, kissed it
Into the ears eyes face toes skin of those who loved
The morning stillness at Manhattan Beach,
Far from those urban battlefields going south,
Miles distant from the concrete causeways
Crucifying your child over & over again
Beyond the pale, beyond the artificial tan now
Into the deep browning for those forever erased
By the ash-colored bullets failing words
the last word
steal into the sleep of reason with your mind’s rapier
to slice old fungal lies away
it does not wait for you, the second chance
any longer to advise your wayward wend
from the once best places inside you
stalk the night’s predator with your own,
take me instead to the dispensary of false dreams
as I attempt to believe in you again
all the scrivener amblings in world libraries
spelling peace in a universal language
won’t be gone, nor the meaningful “I’s”
dotted to open again for newfound allegiance
to the newly defined WORD
The tongue kisses what pure truth
Now with rain’s physical defining
Washing us clean
From the censorship words must cleanse
Fevers of the Mind 